Saturday, February 14, 2015

I never bothered reading The Slap
but I certainly did watch the ABC series. The interrogation of class,
race, and Australian identity was compelling in the televisual format.
Though the series left me little desire to try and read the original
novel. Fastforward a bit, and my job at a bookstore allowed me acquire
an advanced reading copy of Tsiolkas's newest novel, Barracuda.

Barracuda,
unlike the animal itself, is a messy beast, splashing and thrashing
through the form of the novel leaving bits and pieces strewn about. Like
a couple of other novels I've started and left behind, Barracuda is
an example of the form of the novel in its last gasps, its death knell,
its cry for mercy from terrible writers who have nothing new to add
other than poorly realized characters and situations.

However, despite recognizing that Barracuda is
an example of the terrible decay of the "novel," I still kind of liked
it. It's a heavyhanded novel that wants so badly for the reader to get it,
to be on the same program. I like it despite the heavy hand with which
Tsolkas labours. It's an earnest novel, as if Tsiolkas thinks he is the
first to point out the racism, the classism, the hypocrisy of the
bourgeoisie in Australia. As if with every scene he composed, Tsolkas
chuckled to himself, "Fuck, wait until they get a load of this! It'll
blow their stuffy prissy minds!" But it is because of his earnest desire
to shock and offend the middle class that I admire Barracuda. The
word "cunt" is repeated almost on every page, while Danny, the
protagonist spits, fights, swears, and shouts and pretty much every
single character.

There's a pointless detour near the
end of the novel in which Danny as an adult accompanies his mother to
visit her dying Jehovah's Witness mother. After "rebelling" against the
family, Danny's mother was cast out, exiled and excommunicated for
giving up the faith, for turning away from God. The sequence has two
goals for the overall narrative: to introduce Danny to the idea that his
redemption comes in the form of being an aide to cognitively impaired
victims of head trauma; to add some more social observation that
orthodoxy -- whether of religious or social -- is intrinsically damaging
and prevents a Forster-style connection.

Both of these points had already been made, believe it or not. Barracuda for
almost no narrative or thematic purpose, is nonlinear. The structure
follows two discrete nonlinear paths: jumping around in the past while
also jumping around in the present. The novel is of two halves -- with
both past and present being juxtaposed throughout. The end of the first
part reveals what it is that sent Danny to prison, something
foreshadowed painfully in both past and present sequences.

Thus,
we already knew that Danny finds redemption in the role of aide for
those left with cognitive disabilities. It's presented to the reader
fairly upfront. We also already knew that concepts of orthodoxy limit
the growth of individuals; it's a point made ad nauseum. So why then,
does the novel spend 40 or so pages in this physical (they roadtrip to
Adelaide) and figurative detour?

To answer this question, I'm reminded of Michael Hofmann's scathing hatchet job of Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North .
Though I haven't read Flanagan's Booker Prize winning novel (and might
not), I recognize Hofmann's chief complaint. The novel, as a form, is
boring. I'm going to quote Hofmann at length, so bear with me:

It
used to be that a novel would put you among people, tell you a story or
stories, give you some sense of what it might be like to see a
different cut-out and perspective of the world: as a schoolteacher, an
adulteress, the wife of a member of Parliament, an officer, a cockroach.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the novel in an advanced
and showy state of dissolution. It is as though the contemporary novel –
like film (4-D, coming soon to a cinema near you), like theatre, like
so much else – is in competition with itself, falling over itself to
offer you more interiority, more action, more understanding, more
vision. But the form, the vessel, is an exploded form; it is basically
rubble, fragmentary junk, debris. It’s not even leaky anymore; it can
hold nothing.

Hofmann's salient point here, which
applies easily to Tsiolkas's "novel" is that it pretends to provide
interiority, pitched to the maximum. Novels, especially "literary"
novels that aspire to prizes, to important meaning, are essentially
carefully curated events with each moment ruthlessly calculated for
specific affect. Hofmann is astute to compare the Literary Novel to the
blockbuster film. Both are endlessly and exhaustively calculated, shorn
of authenticity or organic affect.

Jonathan McCalmont, a critic I greatly respect, writes of the most recent Transformers blockbuster that:

art house films like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life work
with the process by presenting the audience with evocative yet
ambiguous imagery that encourages the audience to develop their own
creative and interpretative powers. Conversely, Hollywood blockbusters
are less interested in encouraging audiences to make up their own minds
than they are in producing a carefully curated experience in which the
audience is told what to think, what to feel and when to feel it. In
this type of oppressive creator-consumer relationship, breathing room is
the last thing you want as the more audiences are allowed to think for
themselves, the harder it becomes to ensure that audiences are having
the type of cinematic experience that can be sold to advertisers and
government bodies.

Heaven forbid the audience manages
to think about the cultural object in their hands. Here, though, I must
quibble with McCalmont's phrasing. He refers to this dialectic as a
"creator-consumer relationship." The idea that any "creation" is
involved in these projects is laughable. The Individual Artist toiling
away to produce the Great Novel is a concept of the past. Think of the
countless gates the manuscript must past before reaching publication:
writer, editor, agent, publisher, editor again, marketing, design,
promotion, film rights, television rights. Obviously, not all of these
gates change the object itself, but change the relation between object
and consumer. The object, in this case, Tsiolkas's Barracuda
crosses the Rubicon into our hands, carefully curated by writer, editor,
publisher, etc etc etc. It's the literary equivalent to middle brow
schlock as The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything.
These aren't aesthetic objects to be enjoyed, interpreted, loved,
hated, considered, or remembered. No, they are consumer products to be
consumed and then discarded. The moment the object relents and allows
you to think for yourself, you'll notice the "exploded form," the debris
caused, paradoxically, by the careful smoothing over of edges to
maximize the interiority. Here, we do not have Creators, but Producers.

What aura does Barracuda and
its ilk have? What aura could the Novel possibly have after its
infinite reproduction by mechanical means? Obviously, I'm mobilizing
Walter Benjamin here to speak not only of products like Barracuda but of the infinite reproduction of the form of the novel.
Like Hofmann writes, the form of the novel is "basically rubble,
fragmentary junk" that has lost its authenticity through the constant
repetition of the structure, the characters, the promise of interiority,
the "play" with time. All of these elements that Barracuda uses are boringand have been repeated endlessly. Benjamin writes:

One
might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to
say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the
aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose
significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by
saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object
from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it
substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.

The novel is no longer novel. We have been provided a plurality, or better yet, an archive
of curated effects for so long, we haven't realized it's the same thing
over and over. The affect that Literary Novels traffics in is the same,
reproduced faithfully but without feeling. Yes, the Literary Novel
peddles feeling without feeling and we stand amidst the rubble, the
debris, and think, "well that's a nice story" that made us feel "good" or feel "bad."

We've confused the piles of rubble that constitute the novel with Great Art because it has been curated so carefully as to imitate Great
Art. It's the substitution of novel form and thought (novel as in new)
for the Literary Novel, a tired repetition without a difference, an
exhaustive archive of engineered affect.

I'm reminded of Jacques Derrida's theories on the archive that he formulated in, fittingly enough, Archive Fever.
He writes that the archive, as an idea, contains, holds, and preserves:
"[t]he concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this
memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory
which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it."
In other words, the archive is transparent (by virtue of its existence)
and concealed (by virtue of which it contains). The archive, due to its
physical impression, has a radical finitude. Its very physicality means
it is not eternal. The archive then has a fever to maintain its
existence. Derrida writes, "It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and
nostalgic desire for the
archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a
homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of
absolute commencement." The archive is conservative, but transparently
so.

Likewise, the Literary Novel, despite its pretensions to innovations in form (the nonlinearity in Barracuda
is far from innovative), is compulsively focused on the nostalgic
return to its origin. The novel, as many have pointed out over the
years, hasn't really changed in a century. A small handful of writers,
drops in an infinite ocean of novelists, have tried to wrestle with the
form, to make something new of the debris, the rubble. Yet, continually,
the Novel returns to the same thing, to the same program of affect, the
same totalitarian producer-consumer relationship that organizes the
interiority for ease of access.

Barracuda is like other novels I've read (or abandoned, such as Andrew O'Hagen's The Illuminations,
which seems so boring and safe); there's nothing novel about this. From
its movement back and forth through space to its pretensions at social
relevance, Barracuda has all the trappings of the Literary Novel.
It lies broken among countless other novels. Its plot, an allegory for
the sudden success that Tsiolkas himself found after the publication of The Slap,
is heavier than lead. It's barely even worth mentioning the plot; as
with other Literary Novels, it's about the feelings of accomplishment
from the reader, rather than the affective or narrative journey
undertaken by the object. We're supposed to feel better about ourselves
that we read a Literary Novel that won a Great Prize. Reading
Prizewinners keeps us relevant, helps us stay afloat in an era of near
infinite waves of reproduction of novels. How to stay topical? Read a
Prizewinner that talks about serious subjects. It doesn't do anything with those subjects; it merely substitutes interiority and meaning for the illusion of it, all for the puerile gratification of the reader. When Barracuda "tackles"
race or class, it does so in the most obvious way possible, so that its
plot or thematic points are pitched at a register high enough that
children could even grasp that "racism is bad!"

Reading Literary Novels is aspirational. We
struggle through these Great Big Novels about Big Subjects in order to
improve ourselves, in order to maintain our loosening grip on relevancy. Of course, I run the risk of appearing to be an elitist pompous ass with this line of reasoning, and perhaps I am. Throughout this review, I've made sure to include myself, using the "we" pronoun, to make sure that I'm guilty of the same aspirational nonsense as others. I'm a hypocrite; I read Literary Novels for the same reasons others do. The motive is similar to going to see Transformers: Age of Extinction. I want to experience something, anything. A Literary Novel such as Barracuda provides escapism, tourism, and a sense of accomplishment. Escapism, I've always maintained, has its use. The problem is when every cultural object becomes escapist, a danger that Literary Novels present, considering their infantilizing authoritarian stance on affect: "feel this when you are told to feel."

Where is the ambiguity? Not the purported moral ambiguity that Romances like Game of Thrones haphazardly present, but an aesthetic ambiguity, where the cultural object dares you to feel something beyond the pat emotions of "good" or "bad." Barracuda has no aesthetic ambiguity; it's not a novel to love or hate. It's imminently disposable -- onto the next one! I'd rather hate a novel than feel ambivalent. I read Barracuda in a timely fashion (less than 24 hours), so I suppose that's some sort of compliment? That it's readable? The prose is accessible enough -- though ugly and blunt. Is this the most I can say about the experience I had with this novel, this project that tons of people worked on? How disappointing.

"Barracuda is a readable novel that people read to feel simple things and to think simple things. It is successful in that endeavour."

That's the blurb you should put on this and countless other novels. It's the most I can say about the emotional journey I had with Barracuda.

Friday, February 6, 2015

This month, I moved into a house with my partner. The move itself was stressful, exhausting, exhilarating. We're not entirely settled in, but half of my books are. There's a distinct pleasure in releasing books from their cardboard prisons, letting them gasp for the shelf. At my parents' house, in my old bedroom, lay the other half of my books. There are a lot. Some books have been sitting on the shelves there for years, waiting for me, calling to me. Both Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow beckon to me, daring me to ascend their mountainous reputation. After seeing the film of Inherent Vice, which I enjoyed, (I also quite liked the novel) I had the hankering of trying to read Against the Day, a project I memorably failed at. However, when I unpacked Against the Day, I also unpacked Pynchon's acknowledged masterpiece, 1973's Gravity's Rainbow. I thought perhaps now I'm ready, now I'm prepared both mentally and emotionally for one of the supreme postmodern fantasies.

The last time I tried to read this behemoth, I stumbled quite immediately, giving up around page 70, specifically during the scene in which Slothrop imagines/remembers dropping his harmonica down the toilet. He plunges into the ceramic void, leaving his legs and back vulnerable. He then imagines Malcolm X and other black people pulling off his pants and preparing his anus for penetration. In order to escape this predicament, Slothrop tumbles into an underground world of literal shit, which gets everywhere. It's a harrowing sequence, not only for the racism, but for the visceral yet oneiric prose. I have never forgotten this scene.

Starting Gravity's Rainbow for the third or fourth time (the very first time, a quickly aborted attempt, was during high school with a cool looking 80s paperback I'm sad I sold or lost), I certainly enjoyed the prose a lot more. There's a certain looping loopy madness to Pynchon's sentences that is a pure joy to read. I read somewhere, and I can't remember where, that Pynchon has a "mathematical exactitude" to his prose. This description captures part of the allure of his work. While each scene might jangle and shake, as if another word or Dickensian joke name will derail the dangerously overloaded train, each word feels perfectly placed. If forced to point to a single strength in Pynchon's prose, it must be the focalization. Most of the novel is in present tense, third person, but the narrator refuses to stay there, moving into and out of characters, back and forth through time, creating an oscillation of focalization. Surely this is intentional as oscillation, parabolas, and the relationship between cause and effect is of the utmost interest to the novel.

A sample of the prose, then perhaps? Here we have 125-6 of the original Viking edition (the pagination also corresponds with the Penguin Classics featuring rocket blueprints). In this section, Roger Mexico contemplates his relationship with Jessica and his job as statistician with Pointsman:

He was taken over then, for half a minute, shivering and yawning in his long underwear, soft, nearly invisible in the December-dawn enclosure, among so many sharp edges of books, sheafs and flimsies, charts and maps (and the chief one, red pockmarks on the pure white skin of lady London, watching over all. . . wait. . . disease on skin . . . does she carry the fatal infection inside herself? are the sites predestined, and does the flight of the rocket actually follow from the fated eruption latent in the city . . . but he can’t hold it, no more than he understands Pointsman’s obsession with the reversal of sound stimuli and please, please can’t we just drop it for a bit. . . ), visited, not knowing till it passed how clearly he was seeing the honest half of his life that Jessica was now, how fanatically his mother the War must disapprove of her beauty, her cheeky indifference to death-institutions he’d not so long ago believed in—her unflappable hope (though she hated to make plans), her exile from childhood (though she refused ever to hold on to memories). . . .

Gorgeous. Notice the free indirect speech during the aside, matching the rhythm of Roger's confusion and introspection. Rather than capture the bouncing reality of stream-of-consciousness, the narrators keeps a more looping quality to it, repeating the structure of parenthetical asides as almost punctuation. I'm always reminded of James Wood and his book How Fiction Works. He writes about the concatenation of seemingly insignificant details that amount to significance. It is simple clauses, simple little moments, physical characteristics, thoughts, feelings, sensations, that accumulate and make a novel living. Here, Pynchon adds a tiny clause, a single word surrounded by commas in order to make this moment. In the first sentence, Roger shivers in his long underwear, and then Pynchon adds the word "soft" taking this description from good to fully realized. The word "soft," enclosed in its own clause, is evocative, alluring, almost a whisper of sensation. The sounds of "soft" are composed of a voiceless alveolar sibilant (s), an open back unrounded vowel (as represented by "ɑ" in the International Phonetic Alphabet), a voiceless labiodental fricative (f), finished by an voiceless alveolar stop (t). The assemblage of the sounds amounts to essentially a soft stop, and thus, enclosed in its own clause, creates an arresting yet gentle moment. Yes, as de Saussure reminds us, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Yet, somehow, the word "soft" does an amazing amount of labour for a tiny word comprising four letters. Wiktionary informs me (sorry, my subscription to the OED has lapsed unfortunately) that "soft" comes from Middle English ("softe"), then from Old English ("sōfte") and then from Proto-Germanic "*samftijaz" which spectacularly includes the word "level" in the list of meanings. Finally, the modern English "soft" probably derives from Indo-European prefix "*sem-" indicating "one" or "whole." I might point out that Roger, in this passage, is contemplating his lack of oneness, his lack of "at-one-ment" but finds some sort of solace in his long underwear. I can't claim that Pynchon knew all this (the history of "soft"!) when including this clause, but the beauty of this clause is more than its sound or its isolation.

Gravity's Rainbow does, like all masterpieces, reward this type of reading, this type of concentrated combing of abstruse meaning from seemingly inconsequential words. For example, Pynchon sets an early sequence of the text in a "grimed brick sprawl" called the Hospital of St. Veronica of the True Image for Colonie and Respiratory Diseases. While it's a typically funny garrulous Pynchonesque title, the phrase itself includes a pretty good pun. Veronica, cut in half provides us with "vera" and "icon" which we know are the Latin originals for "true" and "image." This is obviously the kind of fun that I'm made for. This is why I enjoyed Joyce so much (enJoyced?).

Perhaps more than the prose of Gravity's Rainbow, I was struck by how thoroughly the theme is incorporated into the novel. This might seem like a strange compliment to afford a novel ("why, it manages to say something consistently; how novel!"), Pynchon truly earns a thematic complexity that not very many novels manage to sustain. The idea of a rocket is thought through in countless exhaustive ways, from the phallic to the mechanical. The motion of the rocket is also comprehensively considered: in the structure of the text, in the oscillations of focalization, from a sentence to sentence, and in the motions of the characters. Gravity's Rainbow, as a complete novel, is an arc, with the strike of the rocket in the first couple pages, and the launch on the final, which of course speaks to the novel's obsession with the complicated relationship between cause and effect.

This examination of causality, the fallacy of it, is not simply a philosophical game for Gravity's Rainbow; this investigation includes even close introspection on the concept of paranoia and conspiracies. Pynchon is quite known for the inclusion of conspiracies within his texts and here, he takes the intrigue to its apotheosis. He comments quite astutely on the figure of the paranoiac and its obsessive tendency to see connections where there are none. The rocket's parabolic motion, a symbol for the linear, the observable, is turned around, a connection is made between two unconnected events (strike, then launch?). Is this simple paranoia or evidence of a vast plot?

The plot of the novel is typically vast, of course. I found it difficult to follow, especially considering the size of the cast, the geographic distance traversed, the potentially random but perhaps not connections between plot points. This is a novel that moves both linearly and not. The plot moves forward from point to point but not in the "correct" fashion of "event b happens because event a." No, that would be too easy, and not thematically apropos. I mobilized various resources in my (non-linear) journey through Gravity's Rainbow; they were of indescribable help. I am not too proud to admit I had help. I am proud, however, to proclaim that I finished it. Even if the last hundred pages were almost impossible.

Now I can say I've read it, that I've finished one of the more difficult novels in the English language. Honestly? It wasn't that it was difficult in terms of plot, prose, or coherence. The issue is that Gravity's Rainbow is dense and challenging in terms of subject. I learned quite a bit about chemistry, physics, engineering, comic books, and mathematics. There's a complicated "log"-"cabin" joke (as in "logarithm") that's delivered in the form of an equation (page 450). It's also a joyous novel filled with utterly human moments such as when a German rocket scientist, sequestered into research, has yearly visits with his daughter, only for a week each time, and he suspects that the Third Reich has replaced her one year with a doppelganger for convenience's sake. He isn't sure, and the indeterminate nature of his "daughter" haunts him (pages 420-1). There's also long moments of pure art, art for art's sake, such as when Pynchon provides an overview of the War (128-136), how it affects everybody, how it changes everything. He also flashes forward into an obscure future "The Occupation of Mingeborough" in which kids are shown to grow old, "with or without Uncle Tyrone" Slothrop (page 743). Utterly heartbreaking yet life affirming at the same time.

I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's story "Good Old Neon," the whole story predicated on Wallace's attempt to imagine his high school acquaintance's life. Like anything Wallace did in his too-short life, the project operates entirely on empathy. Wallace wanted to understand, wanted to experience in order to relate. He used his considerable intellect not to show off, not to lord over people, but to connect with them. I believe Pynchon is also interested in more than postmodern games in Gravity's Rainbow. Perhaps the text is attempting to grapple with large philosophical and moral dilemmas (such as how War could continue on such a scale, and why) while connecting them with the human figures that are inevitably, inexorably, chewed up by the system. Here is Pynchon at his most humanist, I believe, from page 231:

"I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive...."

Simply here, simply alive.

I loved Gravity's Rainbow. Perhaps, I enjoyed V more, if only because it was zany and unbelievable, but this text says more, does more, includes more, without sacrificing focus or humanity. It's a beautiful novel, and I think Pynchon's tendency towards beauty is often forgotten or underrepresented in comparison to his unhinged brilliance.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Pearl clutching! OMG! Children speak in vulgarities! They have sex! They struggle with their (gender) identity! OMG! Won't somebody purse their lips and disapprove of such things?

Raziel Reid's novel is closer to Bret Easton Ellis than current day Bret Easton Ellis. Both control a supremely disaffected narrative voice that masks terrible pain. Both present a worldview highly refracted through the incessant and inescapable celebrity world. Specific narrative tricks, such as imagining lightbulbs to be the flashes of paparazzi, and going "off script," are not unique to either, but certainly Reid is echoing, intentionally or not, Ellis's 1999 novel Glamorama. Whether or not it's successful is a different story.

I'm reminded, while reading this, of a forthcoming publication in The Walrus about trans fiction by cis writers. Characters must suffer, with blood, with pain, with tropes, in order to be enveloped into the canon of literature. A purification ritual almost. This same trope rears its head in Reid's novel, and not always to its credit.

Reid's narrator goes through a violent and humiliating series of events in order to -- well, perhaps that's where Reid's construction betters. This is a supremely ambiguous novel. Are all these characters awful, or is it a performance? Is there truly a difference anymore? Does one's socio-economic background determine one's fate, one's gender, one's sexual proclivities, or are they shaped by the omnipresent media? All great questions asked by Reid's novel and almost none of them answered. Of course, providing pat explanations of complex social events is not the novel's purview, so surely we won't fault it for refusing us intellectual closure.

Presumably, the chief question posed by this novel's reader is "why?" As in, why should we care for this cast of unlikable children who obsess over spiritually degrading things such as celebrity culture? Does the novel condemn these people for their less than healthy interest in fame? Or does it present fame as a coping mechanism for the socio-economic barriers presented by the dump town? Why does the novel ask us to care for these people but then makes little to no effort to show us why?

The shock tactic strategy of When Everything Feels like the Movies is a political one. This is Queerness as a political stance. Queerness as a challenge to the cis heteronormative structures that rule and control our lives. This is Queerness as disruption in the form of shock, sex, drugs, and violence. Queer folks try to live outside these oppressive structures and one way to facilitate this ejection from totality is to disrupt, to protest, to fight back using the very structures that hold. Heteronormativity wants to use sexual identity as a controlling mechanism, a disciplinary technology? Sure, we'll just take that very technology and fuck it, showing you how empty and powerless it should be. Reid's novel answers that call, answers that challenge.

I find myself less shocked by the novel but lulled instead. This type of protest is old hat: not that these techniques of aggression aren't necessary (they sure fucking are) but I'm familiar with them already. Thus, I can't really be annoyed by the pearl clutching. It's a required effect of Reid's Queer resistance. If people didn't clutch their pearls, When Everything Feels like the Movies would have been less successful.

Reid's prose, like his protest, didn't quite do the trick for me. I understood the necessity of this flat narrator's voice, but I found myself unimpressed by the technique; I've seen it before. There are moments when Reid's narrator finds a clever or pretty turn of phrase. Here is a paragraph from later in the novel after Jude, the protagonist has decided to leave his shitty one horse town and has received some money from his estranged father (the "him" at the end).

[The town sign] said "Welcome to hell." Someone had crossed out the name of our town and spray-painted "hell" in red letters over it. I laughed, imagining my grandma's expression when she saw it. It was snowing, and I could hardly see. It was like the air was white. But I could see the letters on the sign, dripping like blood. The snow was so deep it was pulling me under, seeping into my boots. I looked down the highway. It was a long black stroke of ink that told a never-ending story. I stood and waited, and every time I saw a pair of headlights through the storm, I was sure it was him.

Here we have a bunch of similes and metaphors strung together. Not all these similes are entirely successful ("it was like the air was white") but these moments of imagery concatenate for atmosphere. Notice the three colours being deployed in order to sustain a decent moment of imagery. Jude could "hardly see" because of the snow. All that he can see are: the red letters of the sign, denoting his hellish town; the white snow blanketing everything, connoting his own vision, his own ability to see options, connoting also his lack of physical and mental mobility; the black stretch of highway that takes him away from the town. The red is finite, dripping, slowly taking over; the black is infinite, open, accessible, "never-ending." Notice Reid's repetition of gerunds for a sense of present tense in a past tense narration. He uses "imagining," "snowing," "dripping," "pulling," "seeping," and then "never-ending." He then resists the expectation with the final sentence, stating plainly and firmly that Jude "stood" and "waited" both words with strong consonants, the "t" sound, the voiceless alveolar stop that is occlusive, meaning that it prevents airflow, creating a stop. Other writers might have continued the pattern of gerunds, providing us with "I stood, waiting," but Reid instead (and wisely) chooses the past tense form. "Stood" and "waited" are both stops, in a way, so Reid matches form (verb declension) with content (action).

Unfortunately, moments such as this are not frequent. Reid uses the Ellis pattern again of deploying scenes of heavy dialogue, full of arch irony and "jokes", then punctuates these scenes with moments of proper prose. It's a classic technique that sort of kind of works. Jude's vacuous demeanor is possibly a front, so moments of introspection pierce through our perception -- and the cast's perception, more importantly -- to present a more fully realized character. However, the tonal shift between arch irony and pathos filled moments of introspection is akin to whiplash sometimes.

When Everything Feels like the Movies is a good novel, not a great one. Its discussion of celebrity culture obsession is old hat, but its method of resistance to heteronormativity is useful and welcome. People will clutch their pearls about the mature subject matter, but honestly, these pearl-clutchers must have never hung around 13 year olds; they're absolutely vulgar, and deploy phrases and words they don't fully understand in order to be perceived as more mature. This effect refracts through the novel. We're not supposed to believe these characters. They're acting, they're performing. These are unreliable narrators and they signal this to you.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

The Child Garden by Geoff RymanThe Bone Clocks by David MitchellPerdido Street Station by China MievilleAcceptance by Jeff VandermeerGhostwritten by David MitchellThe Handmaid's Tale by Margaret AtwoodThe Value of Art by Michael FindlayAuthority by Jeff VandermeerTenth of December by George SaundersAnnihilation by Jeff VandermeerThe Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

There might be a couple other collections to add to the list, which I'll update as I remember.

2014's project of less straight white dudes was, I would like to think, a success. I was less focused on the project in November and December because, frankly, I had had enough. However, previous to this opening of the floodgates, I found the imposition of a limit to be paradoxically freeing. Rather than the interminable cycle of guilt in which I force myself to read Great White Dude Authors of note, those stalwarts of Great Lists and subsequently abandon them, I discovered -- to me -- new, rich, untapped areas of literature. Previously sparked interests in Afrofuturism or queer cyberpunk were fanned into healthy flames. The project moved beyond the liberal backpatting of reading outside my subject position and into a realm of new experiences to be internalized and reflected upon.

Politically speaking, I accomplished nothing more than a heightened sense of self-worth as I perceived something worthier and more value in my project. No, I believe the true value in 2014's project was an increase in my virtual stores of empathy. Thanks to a year of affect theory, the arcane branch of philosophy interested in the circulation and economy of emotions, I focused heavily on how these cultural objects affected me and how that change was perceived within and refracted without. Empathy, as philosophers and social scientists such as Steven Pinker have pointed out, is one of the great contributors to the establishment of this unparalleled age of (relative) peace from violence. The ability of empathy is not to simply think and feel like another, but rather, to consider that the other has had a lifetime of completely different experiences, though commonalities can be easily found thanks to the circulation of emotions, maybe not easily parsed, but understandable enough. That I contend is the true benefit of this project: a greater desire to comprehend the emotional lives of other people through cultural objects.

Obviously, reading literature is an imperfect way to consider the emotions of other people. Frankly, a better more immediate method would be to simply talk to other people. However, I see no harm in attempting both. If I'm going to engage with culural objects (an inevitability), then why not try to better myself through less politically suspect persons? Not everything I read was entirely without problematic elements, but I read less racist, sexist, homophobic shit than ever: a truer sign of success has yet to present itself.

2015's project is a different animal. My partner and I moved into a house, though not permanently. The great danger in moving somewhere with more space is that one tends to fill that space with more crap. I would like, in a larger sense, to pare down the immense amount of stuff my partner and I share. I won't be paring down books, unfortunately, because after the last two Great Purges, I have no desire to re-buy anything. Thus, I plan to work on the back catalogue, those ceaselessly calling sirens of literature that sleep under a blanket of dust on my shelves. The rules for 2015 are simple: I shall not purchase any books, I will only acquire them free (ARCs, gifts, etc). This forces me to read that which languishes unread, unloved.

Hopefully, this means 2015 is the year that I tackle some of the great beasts that have been waiting, such as Infinite Jest, JR, and Gravity's Rainbow, among others. I might even start Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (though I should know myself better than to aspire too high). I also want to finish the different series that I've read, including Katherine Ann Goonan's Nano Quartet, Octavia Butler's Patternist series, Connie Willis's WW2 time travel duo, among others.

It's already February 1st and I haven't purchased a single book. That, I believe, is a good omen of things to come. Here's to 2014; I'm glad to close the door on you.

As for the books read in January? Here are my thoughts in easily consumed bursts.

The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer was excellent, mostly. The first book, Annihilation was stunning, vivid, and fully realized, even as it was vague and purposefully opaque. Vandermeer is not a writer known for rich characterization, yet I found myself pleasantly drawn into the inner life of the unnamed narrator. The second book was, initially, a crushing disappointment; rather than continue with the science fiction trope of explorers in strange lands, Authority shifts to an office intrigue, light on the intrigue, heavy on the bureaucracy. I say initially because with time, I came to realize that the disappointment was in the tonal shift, not in the content. Sure, Authority could use a trim (but what doesn't?), though I enjoyed it in retrospect. The third was... interesting: not quite as successful as the first, but certainly an improvement on the second. I greatly appreciated that Vandermeer was reticent in answering the big questions. I could have done with less answers, to be honest.

George Saunders' much lauded collection of stories, Tenth of December was okay, the reality of the work certainly not matching the hyperbolic praise lavishing heaped on the slim volume's shoulders. The weird science fiction elements hopelessly and negatively forced comparisons (unconscious and not) to the late great David Foster Wallace, especially, the product testing story that couldn't sustain its premise or its characters, an unequal shadow of DFW's stories in Oblivion. That being said, I still liked the odd story or two. The prose, while unspectacular, was unobtrusive and pleasant.

I had always meant to read Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale but had never got around to it. I am very glad I did; it's Atwood pared down to the maximum of her considerable talents. It's not a perfect novel (the middle sags like so many other middles do) but the final third is as masterful as anything else she has written. The themes of technology, theocratic power, and patriarchy resonant still to this day, possibly even more. A Foucauldian reading of this novel seems painfully obvious but necessary, a task I won't bother with, presuming other better thinkers have tackled this classic.

Though I had only read Cloud Atlas, I have great admiration for David Mitchell's ambition, perhaps less so for his actual skill. Starting Ghostwritten, his debut, I meant to read only the first section of nine, but when I looked up, I was a third through the novel. I had forgotten how utterly compulsive reading Mitchell. His prose is so pleasant, so easily digested. Luckily, the subject matter of Ghostwritten matches the prose. Unlike Cloud Atlas's fascination with spirituality, Mitchell's debut is interested in geographical, political, and social connections. These connections manifest thematically in Mitchell's introduction of banking systems, economies of consumables, and the Internet. It's a success, even if the final two stories are a bit of a slog. The Bone Clocks, his longest and most recent novel, was good, I would say. The final story was absolutely stellar, showcasing his humanist interest in emotions. The fantasy elements of the novel are quite unsuccessful, to the point where I didn't really need them. Oh well.

I had started Perdido Street Station when I was in high school, and I quickly gave up. Mieville's prose is beautiful, but too dense for the adolescent me. Luckily, I gave the novel another try, and I'm happy that I did. The lushness of both his prose and his world made the slow start to the novel easy to conquer. The plot was fun and tickled many of my fancies. I was especially pleased to read a fantasy novel (or science fiction -- whatever) that consider the economics of its constructed world. It always drives me nuts when manufacturing, industry, agriculture, and currency is never thought through. I always wonder where items come from. Mieville, with his PhD, has thoroughly considered not only the economics, but also the politics of his world. Perdido Street Station was probably my favourite read of January, enough that I eagerly await reading the follow-up novel.

The Child Garden was a hard read. I find myself fascinated with a really specific sub sub subgenre of science fiction called "biopunk," the technologically oriented hacking of biology (a theme that features heavily in Perdido Street Station). Ryman's world considers the impact of genetically engineered viruses that cure disease and provide limitless knowledge to the infected. This sounds utterly fascinating, but Ryman's plot was far more interested in a character study of a rather flat protagonist and her relation to an opera based on Dante. It's obtuse and unwieldly, and I had to force myself through the novel. I didn't hate it; certainly Ryman's beautiful prose made it easier. I wish that I loved the book more. I wish I had loved the characters or cared about them in any way. I wish that the political dimensions of the novel hadn't been so... sophomoric (ie the main political thrust of the book is that Communism leads to a dangerous paucity of creativity, leading to large scale social stagnation -- yawn). Alas. Perhaps a second read would result in a better experience, but who has time for re-reads?

I'm pretty sure I read Gaiman's short novel in December, but I might have read it in November. Confession: I only read the novel because my partner needed it read for the class they teach. Otherwise, I would have never read it. What should have been one sitting dragged onto three because I fucking hate Gaiman's prose. He's the Hugh Grant of literature: bumbling, blandly charming, inoffensive, and coasting off success from 25 years ago. This novel was unbelievably forgettable. I have no idea what happened in it and it doesn't matter in the slightest what happened because it's about stories in the same way that everything Gaiman does. Ugh. (I will say this though: I quite enjoyed his Doctor Who story about Cybermen)

Robert Aickman, an author I had never heard of, turns out to be enjoying a critical renaissance. Hopefully this means more of his work will come into print, especially since the four collections of stories I picked up are fucking gorgeous. The stories are "strange stories," his preferred term, and they don't quite fit into the horror slot nor the Weird slot (notice the capital letter). They are their own beasts. Regardless of the subject matter, Aickman's prose is absolutely heavenly, an economic but welcome expanse of descriptive words that capture the ambiguity of the situation without losing the reader. Utterly wonderful. I've read two thirds of The Unsettled Dust and only maybe one story was lacklustre. A few stories haunt me, a verb I don't often use.

About

This is a blog by me that's pretty much for me as I have no readers. I try and write things and think critically about stuff. I am totally embarrassed by the quality of writing and thinking from 2013 and earlier.